Overwrite Author to a consistent name when publishing a post.

Are you currently giving multiple users the same login details? If ‘yes’ then read on…

I came across the need to create a consistent author name across a site, very much like how wordpress.tv seems to be, looking from the public front end. If you see any of the posts that wordpress.tv make its always the same author name even though all the content is obviously being provided by many different users/authors.

So in comes ‘Overwrite Author Name‘ to do a similar job for any of your sites which has multiple authors providing content but you want to have a clean authorship used across the site. The obvious workround for this would be to give all the users (for example office staff) the same username and password details, but this is very inflexible and weakens site security. It would be much better to allow all users to login to the site with their own access rights and capabilities and automatically change the name of the author at the time of publishing a post and this is the reason I created the ‘Overwrite Author Name‘ plugin.

Off-course to re-edit the post/page, once published, users will need the ‘edit_others_posts‘ or ‘edit_others_pages‘ wordpress capability respectively and likewise for any custom post types used.

Give the common user account for the overwrite the lowest level of access for better security, e.g. subscriber. If you are using ‘shortcode-exec-php’ (or other plugin) to inject php into pages/posts then a good compromise is to give the user account the ‘contributor’ access level, in this way the php will run.

Bulk change of author

The ability to easily change all authors in one go is provided by WordPress itself using its ‘Bulk Actions’ choice on the listing of ‘All Posts':